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May Contest Image
Try your hand at coming up with a winning caption!
March Caption Contest Finalists
Once again… very hard to narrow down to six finalists!
See all the March 2012 entries
My garden kicks ass
The story behind the captions
Anne Says: “Before I moved to New Mexico I gave away my pruning shears. I was determined to let the desert be the desert. But it doesn’t work that way. Once you’ve disturbed the desert by building on it, and by walking and playing around your house with your dogs, it will never be the desert again. You either live surrounded by dust, tumbleweeds, and goat’s heads (if you’ve never stepped on a goat’s head before you’re in for a treat) or you make a garden. As I was gluing the words onto this image for the first time, an employee’s son, who was just starting to read, walked up behind me and read “my… garden… kicks… ANNE!!!”
I’m back in Maine, enjoying my first New England spring in 12 years. I did love the New Mexico spring – the sage changing subtly from yellow-green to blue-green, the tiny wildflowers all but hidden in the scrub – and I will be sad to miss the explosion of color in June, when the cholla cactus transform into “rose gardens.” But what a pleasure it is to stroll around my new yard and see green poking up everywhere! My Maine garden is clearly going to kick some major ass.”
Okay… how about these?
I was thrilled to get so many positive reactions to my “testicles” design! Thank you all! Too late to get it into our summer catalog, but look for it for sure in January 2011.
Since I seem to have found such a responsive (and like-minded) panel of experts, let’s really test the limits of good taste:
As you may know, I have recently started working with a few writers. Writer Laura Hohnhold has me falling-off-my-chair-laughing on a regular basis. But some of her submissions are just a little too risqué for my current product line. Now finally, with you, I can share the laughter. As you can see from these two captions for the same image, Laura is an equal-opportunity offender:
Lost in Translation
A couple of years ago, a former Italian ambassador—an extremely charming and elegant man—happened to be visiting… and he happened to spot Sto diventando mia madre on our bookshelf. After a brief perusal, Giovanni gave what, if it hadn’t been so charming and elegant, one might have mistaken for a guffaw… and he told me that the book was really quite vulgar.
Ever since then I’ve been a bit curious, and I finally asked my friend Margherita Pagni, a native of Milan, to translate the book back into English.
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This is the illustration that first caught Giovanni’s eye: |
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The original English version says: |
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… but apparently the Italian “translation” is “cream goes down smoothly for her”. And Giovanni said the clear implication is that this is NOT the kind of cream one puts in ice cream or coffee. You get the picture. As I said, Giovanni is a charming and elegant man, and I don’t think he was making this up.
